Diacritical marks, foreign characters and miscellaneous other unusual signs being one of the many problems translators, terminologists and other written language professionals have to deal with, a list of tools meant to help in solving it is given hereafter.

Search multiple sources (dictionaries, corpora, machine translation engines, search engines) with a single click with this multilingual metasearch engine. Select a language pair and submit a search. MagicSearch will display a single scrollable page with multiple sources. You can click on each source button as it changes its colour (=loads) to move to the respective source. MagicSearch remembers the language pair you selected the next time you visit the site (using a cookie).

You can customize the order of the dictionaries, as well as add/remove dictionaries (just click on the gear icon to display the settings).

There is also a Chrome extension you can install (then press ALT+double click on a word to look it up); or, and this is easier, just select your language pair, click on the Any Browser link and then drag the language pair link to your links bar. Each time you select a word and click on that link on your links bar, it will open a new tab with search results of that specific language pair. If you search for another word, the existing browser tab will refresh with the new search results. For more info, visit the Help page.

MyMemory and others

Translated.net, the translation agency, one of whose characteristics consists in making the most of technology in order to automate project management, recently released a huge collaborative translation memory.

Now available on the Web, MyMemory will soon comprise 300 million translation segments.

To put together this enormous corpus of segments translated into all of the world’s languages, or most of them, Translated.net relied on several sources. For the one thing, the agency has integrated its own translation memories into the system. For the other, it has convinced several others to collaborate on this exceptional project. The translation memories of the European Union, for instance, have been incorporated into the repository.

This project is obviously of great interest, and it seems to combine the advantages of many competing solutions, such as that of TAUS.

It will be recalled that there are other important sources of linguistic content freely available online, including TERMIUMPlus ® or IATE.

TermSciences is a terminology portal developed by INIST in association with LORIA and ATILF. Its aim is to promote, pool and share the terminological resources (specialist vocabularies, dictionaries, thesaurus) of public sector research and further education establishment to thus create a common terminological reference resource.

MateCat is an enterprise-level, free online CAT tool designed to make post-editing and/or outsourcing easy and to provide a complete set of features to manage and monitor translation projects.

MateCat provides the ideal environment for post-editing and translation. Thanks to the integration of the largest collaborative translation memory and the best machine translation, you will always get from 10% to 20% more matches than with any other CAT tool and translate faster than ever.

– Multifultor, by Rolf Keller, is a timesaving program for looking up terminology in dictionaries and almost any data source which you can use to look up a word or phrase. Multifultor can search websites, dictionaries, files and the Windows Index as data sources. Multifultor can help you to save time and effort with the following four sophisticated functions:

– You do not need to enter the search term manually (either a word or a phrase): Multifultor can capture text from the cursor position in the currently active application. This avoids typing errors and problems entering characters in languages if you do not have the correct keyboard or locale settings (for example, Japanese). You can still enter text manually using the keyboard or paste text from theclipboard.

– You do not need to enter a URL or custom settings every time you search the web. Multifultor stores a list of all data sources that you use on a regular basis, including websites and dictionaries. Multifultor knows exactly where to look when you click the name of the data source or press the hotkey combination.

– You can use Multifultor to search multiple data sources with a single click. This saves time in two ways: You only need to enter the search text once and you can search several sources at the same time. If you search four data sources at once and find a useful hit in the second data source before the search has completed, you can simply ignore any further results.

If you are willing to peruse the Manual, have a look at Andrey Yasharov’s most instructive YouTube pointed to hereafter, perhaps, and do a bit of experimenting on your own, Multifultor is well worth the effort. Give it a try and see what you think. You never know, you might very well be seduced :).